Physics Colloquium:
Materials Research Using Synchrotron Radiation

Event Details

Speaker(s):
Tsun-Kong (T.K.) Sham

Date:
Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Synchrotron is an accelerator-based light source that delivers photons with unprecedented tunability in energy and polarization (continuous spectrum from IR to hard X-ray, linear to circular to variable polarization), brightness (highly collimated) and time structure (short pulse). In this talk, the properties of synchrotron radiation will be noted. The applications of a variety of synchrotron techniques taking advantage of these properties and the interaction of light and matter via absorption, such as XAFS (X-ray absorption fine structures), XES (X-ray emission) and XEOL (X-ray excited optical luminescence) in materials research will be illustrated with a series of examples, from d- band filling of noble metals to revealing the interplay of surface and size effects in Au nanoparticles to the origin of morphology-dependent luminescence from Si nanowires and ZnO nanostructures. Several emerging photon-in photon-out techniques, such as resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS), among others that blur the absorption and scattering processes will also be presented.
Research at the University of Western Ontario is supported by NSERC, CFI, CRC, OIT of Canada; synchrotron research was conducted at CSRF (SRC, Madison, supported by NRC, NSERC and US NSF), APS (Chicago, supported by US DOE), ALS (Berkeley, supported by US DOE) and CLS (Saskatoon, supported by NSERC NRC, CIHR and University of Saskatchewan)

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About our Physics Colloquia

The Department of Physics invites notable scientists from all over the world to give big-picture overviews of their areas of research. During the Fall and Winter semesters the aim is to have a colloquium every Tuesday. Please check our Events page regularly for further information.